Serendipitous Discovery of a Novel Murine Astrovirus Contaminating a Murine Helper T-cell Line and Incapable of Infecting Highly Immunodeficient Mice.

Serendipitous Discovery of a Novel Murine Astrovirus Contaminating a Murine Helper T-cell Line and Incapable of Infecting Highly Immunodeficient Mice. Comp Med. 2020 Jul 16;: Authors: Ricart Arbona RJ, Kelly S, Wang C, Dhawan RK, Henderson KS, Shek WR, Williams SH, Altan E, Delwart E, Wolf F, Lipman NS Abstract The unexpected seroconversion of sentinel mice in our facility to murine T lymphotrophic virus (MTLV) positivity led to our identification of a novel murine astrovirus that we designated murine astrovirus 2 (MuAstV-2). During our investigation, MuAstV-2 was found to be a contaminant of the T helper cell line (D10.G4.1) that was used to generate the MTLV antigen that we included in the multiplex fluorometric immunoassay (MFIA) that we used for sentinel screening. We eventually determined that cross-reactivity with the astrovirus generated a positive result in the MTLV assay. A confirmatory immunofluorometric assay (IFA) using the same MTLV-infected cell line yielded a similar result. However, the use of antigen prepared from MTLV-infected neonatal mouse thymus did not reproduce a positive result, leading us to suspect that the seroreactivity we had observed was not due to infection with MTLV. A mouse antibody production test showed that mice inoculated with naïve D10.G4.1 cells and their contact sentinels tested positive for MTLV using cell-line generated antigen, but tested negative in assays using MTLV antigen produced in mi...
Source: Comparative Medicine - Category: Zoology Authors: Tags: Comp Med Source Type: research